Archive for the ‘Festival’ tag
February 15, 2012, 6:00 AM
In Istanbul, a Film Festival Is Heavy on Politics
By SUSANNE FOWLER
Photo courtesy !f FestivalThe actor Kerem Can in the role of Can Ozturk in the Turkish film “Zenne Dancer.
¶¶The !f Istanbul International Independent Film Festival opens on Thursday with several movies that touch on controversial issues. It will screen more than 80 movies for an estimated 55,000 viewers in Istanbul, and many of the films examine matters like politics and the environment, at viewings occasionally hosted by stars.Serra Ciliv, the festival director, said that though there had been no Arab Spring in Turkey, she included two films on protest movements within the country: “Against the Flow,” a student-made film on efforts to block dam-building in the Black Sea region, and “Playing House,” directed by Bingol Elmas, about child brides.
¶One film that does focus on the Arab Spring is the three-part Egyptian documentary “Tahrir 2011’’ by Ayten Amin, Tamer Ezzat and Amr Salama. It begins with the 18-day protest in the Cairo square, followed by interviews with President Mubarak’s security forces, and ends with a section on “how those in power were manipulating, or thought they were manipulating, the people,” Ms. Ciliv said.
¶A screening of a film focusing on homophobia gets an injection of star power. Rupert Everett will host a screening of the Turkish film “Zenne Dancer,” a feature inspired by the story of Ahmet Yildiz, whose father is charged with murder in what has been labeled as the first gay honor killing in Turkey.
Turkish Cinema Newsletter
By STEPHEN HOLDENPublished: October 4, 2011
The opportunity to see two intimidating landmarks — “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and “The Turin Horse” — is reason enough for any filmgoer with more than a passing interest in the evolution of world cinema to be grateful for the platform of the New York Film Festival. Because the chances that either movie will soon be coming to a theater near you, as they say, are next to nil, the best time to see them may be at Alice Tully Hall in the coming week…
“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” begins with the haunting image of a three-car caravan, viewed from afar, as it winds its way through the Turkish countryside in the dead of night. The weary travelers include policemen, a prosecutor, a doctor, grave diggers and a confessed murder suspect taking the search party to his victim’s burial site, which he has difficulty finding.
The main characters — a whimsical prosecutor (Taner Birsel), a misanthropic police chief (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) — each occupy a different moral universe, with the doctor, a Chekhovian figure, the story’s moral fulcrum. Flecked with magical realist touches and a sense of the supernatural, the film takes no shortcuts as its characters discharge their laborious and depressing duties. The autopsy of the corpse concludes the film’s sorrowful, unblinking dissection of the human condition. This third film by Mr. Ceylan to be showcased at the festival, following “Distant” in 2002 and “Climates,” in 2006, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is, in a word, great.
Turkish Cinema Newsletter
Erden Kiral Tribute
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Erden Kıral. An International Turkish Filmmaker
Erden Kıral is one of the major directors in the history of Turkish cinema. He belongs to the second generation of Turkish auteurs who, influenced by Yılmaz Güney, began making films in a climate of political upheaval. Kıral’s generation – which includes Ömer Kavur, Şerif Gören, Zeki Ökten, Ali Özgentürk, et al. – contributed, during the 70s and 80s – to the development of a sociorealist tradition, critically addressing the country’s social problems, such as class inequality, social injustice, internalmigration, economic underdevelopment and the feudal, patriarchic relations of rural Turkey.
Kıral’s cinema is anthropocentric, with its own, idiosyncratic style and language. He draws on Turkish reality and literature, uses realistic, poetical and symbolic narratives, and tackles subjects such as the struggle of ordinary people to survive, the lack of development of theTurkish provinces, the resilience of feudal relations, the lot of the intellectual, and exile. Relying on his cultural heritage and sensitively conveying the sociopolitical conditions of his country, without once falling into the trap of exoticism, Kıral succeeds in addressing an international audience, thanks to the honesty of his gaze, the universality of his concerns, and the artistic integrity of his films.
Clearly influenced by hismentor, Yılmaz Güney, his two first films are unequivocally left leaning. Based on a true event, Τhe Canal (1978) portrays and critiques the landowning and water management systems in force at the time in rural Turkey. In his next film, On Fertile Lands (1980), Kıral adapted Orhan Kemal’s novel for the screen. In it, with feeling and realism, often bordering on the documentary, he chronicled the trials and tribulations of the workers at the cotton plantations, their moving to the cities, their quest for a better future, their loss of principles in the new, urban environment. Transcending the personal tales of the characters, Kıral manages to present a wider image of post-fifties Turkish social reality. A relentless indictment, the film describes a world that denies its inhabitants any kind of humanism, even the possibility to dream.
The military coup of 1980 and the ban on his two first films – in fact, the copies of On Fertile Lands were stolen and the negatives were found 28 years later, in Sweden – drove Kıral into self-exile in Germany, where he carried out a series of co-productions. In 1983 he presented one of the most significant films of his career, A Season in Hakkari, based on the novel by Ferit Edgü. The film, which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and made Kıral known throughout Europe, explores with the simplicity of a documentary the culture shock suffered by a teacher – an intellectual– in an isolated village deep in the Turkish hinterland. Allowing ample time to the development of the narrative and basing himself on his powers of observation, Kıral records with ethnographic precision and effectiveness the cultural encounter between the film’s hero and the villagers – through the otherness of whom the protagonist will discover his real self. Next came The Mirror (1984), yet another poetic narrative that examines the psychology of its characters. Based on a popular legend, the story oscillates between dream and reality, reminiscent of Latin American magical realism. It is an elegy of the people of the countryside and their efforts to survive amid a hostile nature, under medieval living conditions and the fear of the aga, which underscores their repressed emotions as well as their sense of honor and dignity.
In 1987 he made Dilan, focusing on people’s inner conflicts through the story of a woman who’s waiting for her lover – but he never comes. This was followed in 1988 by a Turkish production, Time to Hunt, which portrays the period before the 1980 coup, and, after that, yet another European co-production, The Blue Exile (1993). Based on the autobiography of the Turkish intellectual and journalist Cevat Şakir(1890-1973), the film chronicles his long journey into exile – recreating the atmosphere of the period during which Ataturk founded the Republic – as well as the hero’s personal, inner journey of self-knowledge and purification of his past. The film is a poetic meditation, not only on the life of the author, but also on the essence of life itself, and on the things that people should consider important, regardless of social pressures.
His next film, The Hunter (1998), is based on a popular legend about a beautiful woman whose grave is in a lake. Kıral tells her story from different viewpoints, creating a fairy tale atmosphere and placing emphasis on the power of the gaze – an element that often recurs in his work and is indicative of Güney’s influence.What interests him here is the relativity of truth, the origin of violence, human emotions pushed to the limit, and repressed sexuality.
On the Road (2005) is Kıral’s most personal film to date. It involves the fictional representation of an actual event from the life of director Yılmaz Güney. Its starting point is a trip the two filmmakers took together, when Güney was being transferred to another prison, while he was working on his film The Road, the direction of which Güney had originally assigned to Kıral but then changed his mind. Against the backdrop of Turkey’s sociopolitical situation and through the symbolic use of theTurkish landscape, the filmtreats the concepts of alienation and freedom, scrutinizing the psychology and the complex relationship between teacher and student: on the one hand the repressed creativity of the imprisoned Güney, who assigns the direction of his films to others, and on the other hand, the student Kıral’s need to rebel and become intellectually independent of his influence.
Kıral then made Conscience (2008), a film which was especially sensuous for Turkish cinema standards. It tells a tale of passion, obsession and desire between three working class characters with a disastrous outcome. Golden Horn (2010), his last film so far, was the first documentary of his career. Inspired by the black and white photography of Aras Güler, Kıral portrays the Golden Horn in all its magnificence, underscoring the multiculturalism and the peaceful co-existence of different peoples. The camera follows the mental thread of the narrator, a Greek from Constantinople who returns after many years to the place of his birth, blending his childhood memories with the present day.
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival, wishing to honor this great Turkish filmmaker, presents the most extensive tribute to his work ever shown in Europe. Undoubtedly, his complete oeuvre being screened for the first time in Greece is a unique opportunity for the Festival’s Greek and foreign audiences, who have always embraced Turkish cinema.
Dimitris Kerkinos
Turkish Cinema Newsletter
Mavi Boncuk |
London Film Festival 2011
Law of the Border
Tue 25 | 18:30 | NFT3
Powerful and radical smuggling drama from Turkey, starring the great Yilmaz Güney, rescued and restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation.The happy outcome of another rescue mission by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, created to help archives in developing countries preserve their cinema heritage, Law of the Border marked the beginning of Turkey’s ‘New Cinema’ movement, focusing on the country’s profound social problems. Brought to light by WCF advisory board member Fatih Akin and restored by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna from the wreckage of a single positive print which survived the Turkish military coup d’état in 1980, the film highlights the deprivations of daily life in South-East Turkey – lack of education, no agriculture, unemployment – and their solution: smuggling. Akad’s film has the stylistic qualities of an epic Western – ‘…a work of great visual and dramatic force, of terrific purity and ferocity,’ as Kent Jones, executive director of the WCF, puts it – and was a positive influence on the film’s scriptwriter and star, Yilmaz Güney, about to make his own directing debut and become Turkey’s best-known radical filmmaker and thorn in the government’s side, condemned to a life of political imprisonment and eventual exile in Switzerland.
Clyde Jeavons
Law of the Border
Country: Turkey: Running time: 74min Year :1966
Director: Ömer Lüfti Akad: Writer: Ömer Lüfti Akad, Yilmaz Güney
Cast: Yilmaz Güney, Pervin Par, Hikmet Olgun, Erol Tas, Tuncel Kurtiz:
Turkish Cinema Newsletter
ASTRA FILM FESTIVAL 2011 – Sibiu (Romania) 25th-30th October 2011
ASTRA FILM FESTIVAL – the Sibiu International Festival for Documentary Film – invites filmmakers and producers from all over the world to submit their latest productions to the 11th Astra Film Festival, to take place between 25th and 30th October 2011. The deadline is 1st of May 2011.
AFF is a major event in the European community of documentary film. The Festival is a meeting point for documentary filmmakers from all over the world, promotes the production of quality non-fiction film in Romania and in the region.
AFF is dedicated to showing realities of our world as perceived and interpreted by committed creative documentary filmmakers, and to facilitating open debates with the audience, as well as among professionals.
Over the years, AFF’s interactive, informal and friendly style has facilitated a fertile ground of dialogue among filmmakers and public, professionals, a communication that attracted a large number of true fans.
AFF is the ideal place for filmmakers to test their film with an active public. In October 2011, you are welcome to enjoy once more the ASTRA FILM spirit.
AFF .11th COMPETITION
We welcome creative documentaries produced since 2008, in one of the four competitional sections: INTERNATIONAL Section (documentary films made outside Europe); EUROPEAN Section (documentary films made about Europe);
ROMANIAN DOCUMENTARIES (documentary films about Romania);
STUDENT DOCS (documentaries made as part of a film school, documentary film course)
AFF does not select animations, experimental films, re-enactments, and docu-dramas. As a rule, AFF does not pay screening fees for the films in competition. The directors of the selected films are invited to the Festival for the whole period (accommodation expenses covered by the organizers).
You can submit your film at:
http://astrafilm.kalendasoft.com/entryform/en/submission.aspx
AFF .11th SHOWCASES various non-competitive programs related to documentary film: master classes, regional focus, and good archaic music to complete the well known Astra Film Fest atmosphere.
Astra Film Sibiu
Piata Huet No. 12, 550182 – Sibiu, Romania
Tel/Fax: +4 0269 210 134
Email: aff@astrafilm.ro | Submissions 2011: submission@astrafilm.ro
website: www.astrafilm.ro
CINEMA AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Festivals The 12th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film 2011
London, 24 – 26 June 2011
Sponsored by
The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and
The Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL), and
InSight Education
Submissions are invited from any field of ethnographic film. Only films released (first screened in public) after 1st January 2008 are eligible for competitive screening.
Please submit the form and stills by e-mail (film@therai.org.uk) and send the preview DVD and proof of entry fee by post. Deadline for Submission is 15 January 2011. Don’t spent a fortune on freight costs, but please make sure that the preview DVD will arrive at the RAI office by 31 January at the latest! Thanks!
For submission conditions, entry forms and awarded prizes & awards please see the attachments or check the RAI website http://www.therai.org.uk/film/film-festival/ or the dedicated Film Festival website www.raifilmfest.org.uk (under construction). Here you will soon find as well information about the international conference, workshops and a London ‘Open City‘ Documentary Weekend, which will be held in London around the festival.
Please contact me for any enquiries.
Susanne Hammacher
Film Officer | Festival Manager
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The Royal Anthropological Institute
50 Fitzroy Street
London W1T 5BT
UK
film@therai.org.uk or festival@therai.org.uk
http://www.therai.org.uk
phone: +44-(0)20-7387 0455
CINEMA AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
I just received my official guide to Food Networks’ South Beach Food & Wine Festival. Taking place in various locations throughout Miami Beach, this is one of THE events to experience during the year- luckily, it takes place in my backyard, from February 24-27, 2011. Unfortunately, some events, like Amstel Light Burger Bash presented by Allen Brothers hosted by Rachael Ray are already sold out. Well, better luck next year for that. But there are still plenty of amazing events that still have tickets available, like, Moët Hennessy USA presents Sobe’s 10th Year Anniversary Party “Let Them Eat Cake” hosted by Emeril Lagasse and Martha Stewart sponsored by Ocean Drive Magazine and Dim Sum & Disco at the Setai hosted by Ming Tsai. There are so many events that I would love to attend and I will be posting a new event every day for you to check out. For full details, meanwhile, check out the official website, http://2011.sobefest.com/
Turkish Wine- Turkish Food – Wine Istanbul
Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
* New York, United States November 11 – 14, 2010
* Call for Entry Deadline: May 03, 2010
Festival Data:
o Established: 1977
o Genre: Documentary (click to see)
o Attendance: 3500
o Total Number of Films Submitted: 950
o Total Number of Films Screened: 24
o Total Screenings: 20
o Total National and International Premieres: 22
o # of Shorts Screened: 7
o # of Features Screened: 17
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o Retrospective
o Catalog
o Has Panels
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Festival Website:
www.amnh.org/ mead
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Festival Description:
The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is the longest-running showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction. The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is distinguished by its outstanding selection of titles, which tackle diverse and challenging subjects, representing a range of issues and perspectives, and by the forums for discussion with filmmakers and speakers.
The Mead Festival considers: Documentary films and videos (including shorts, experimental films, essay films, animation, and new media). Production must be completed within the last three years.
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Film Submissions:
o Accepts direct submissions
o Call for Entry: http:/ / www.amnh.org/ programs/ mead/ submit/
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Email: meadfest(at)amnh.org
Phone: (1) 212 769-5305
Fax: (1) 212 769-5329
Mailing Address: American Museum of Natural History Central Park West @ 79th Street
New York, New York 10024
USA
CINEMA AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
